Yesterday, a Nassau County Supreme Court judge ruled that the Nassau County Police Department had improperly withheld records about its relationship with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, and agreed to release them at 10:30 this morning. About 45 minutes before the documents were due to become available, Nassau County attorneys appealed the decision and obtained a stay of the order.

The Nassau County Police Department has acknowledged in a court filing that Bill O'Reilly…
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At a hearing yesterday, after reviewing the documents, Winslow decided that the internal affairs investigation was exempt from the Freedom of Information Law and, with the exception of one page, would stay secret. But he ordered the release of approximately 17 pages of emails and written correspondence between O'Reilly and Mulvey. Much of that, he said, had to do with the construction of what Winslow described in court as an NCPD testing laboratory. The single page from the internal affairs report that Winslow ordered released, he said, was a Civilian Complaint Report signed by Mulvey. In my original story, I reported that Mulvey had directly ordered the investigation, and that the chief of the NCPD internal affairs unit told detectives it was highly sensitive because O'Reilly was considering making a donation to the NCPD Foundation, which is raising funds for the construction of a $48 million police training facility.

Yesterday, Winslow raised the possibility that the NCPD may have failed to hand over all the documents it had. Among the things I asked for in my original request were any records of police visits to addresses associated with the O'Reillys. At the time, the NCPD acknowledged that it had records of visits in its E911 system, and claimed they were exempt. Yesterday, Winslow said that there were no 911 records in the documents NCPD provided to the court. But there were, he suggested, apparent references to 911 calls. It wasn't clear whether those references appeared in the portion of the documents he had cleared for release.

Winslow ordered redacted versions of the correspondence to be made available to me, to the county, and to any interested members of the press at 10:30 this morning. At roughly 9:45 a.m., attorneys for Nassau County filed notice that they would appeal Winslow's decision. Under New York law, the order was automatically stayed. With the help of the NYCLU, I intend to oppose the county's appeal and file a cross-appeal arguing that the internal affairs records, as well as the correspondence, should be released.